


Doctor-Patient Confidentiality

by Twigwise



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Accidental Outing, Cybertronian biology, Drabble, Gen, Hiding Medical Issues, Technobabble, Twoshot, basically red is cybertronian transgender, doctor patient confidentiality, flier-spark!Red Alert, mentions of dysphoria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-11 10:52:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8976712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twigwise/pseuds/Twigwise
Summary: Megatron's plan-of-the-day leaves Red Alert in stasis under Ratchet's care. When Ratchet checks his CPU for signs of his glitch, the CMO instead makes a discovery that necessitates the two having a talk.(Chapter 1 is a lot of technobabble about Cybertronian biology, chapter 2 is the actual feelsy discussion)--Or: In which Ratchet is kinder than usual.





	1. On the Mediberth

**Author's Note:**

> Heya! First fic I'm posting in quite some time, and the first TF fic I've written in literal years. Loosely (and I mean LOOSELY) inspired by a fic on ff.net titled "Earn Our Wings." Mentions of headcanons about cybertronian biology, Red Alert as Sunny and Sides' older brother, and Devastator.

Ratchet exvented a puff of stale, hot air, and reached for a soldering tool on his workbench. Another day, another half-baked plan from Megatron, trying to ambush the Autobots where they were setting up a geothermal energon conversion station near the ARK. The Decepticon ambush party was actually repelled fairly easily- it was only the Constructicons, a few Seeker trines, and Megatron, after all. Hardly a danger for all the forces in the ARK that came rushing to the defense of Hoist, Grapple, and their small crew of volunteers that were working on some sort of drilling rig, at the time.

  
There were minor injuries, to be sure, mostly cosmetic. Nothing the rest of the medical team couldn't handle with scraps and hammers to buff out dings and potshots. Now it was night on Earth, and most mechs were recharging. But then again, Ratchet thought as he dimmed his optical recpetors against the sparks flying out of the metal he began welding, he was operating on a mech for a reason. That reason was, predictably, Devastator. Specifically, it was Red Alert that was in stasis for operation at the moment, after having been grabbed by the helm by the large gestalt, and thrown into the side of a cliff. Though, Ratchet mused while rewiring a broken connection, that wasn't quite accurate.

  
Red Alert was thrown, yes. He had run out of the ARK to the defense of the ambushed Autobots, along with about three dozen other mechs that had been closest to the alarm, and unfortunately he had run straight into Devastator's path. He had turned to warn the others- Ratchet among them- and was moving to run himself, when an enormous purple hand closed around his head. Thankfully, Devastator was feeling merciful, or perhaps thought that the impact of throwing Red Alert would be enough to render the security director inoperable. Whatever the reason, Red Alert was sent flying to the side, arching through the air like a human thrown frisbee.

  
It was strange, though. Ratchet had kept his optics locked with Red Alert's form. He'd mainly wanted to see where the white and red mech was going to land, to recover him after the battle. But the CMO had seen mechs thrown by larger mechs before- it typically resulted in a mad flailing panic before colliding with the ground. Red Alert, ever full of strange surprises, did no such thing. His back plating had flared widely, catching the air and turning him over, where he curled slightly, sticking his feet out in front of him, almost as if he were a flier reversing thrust. Ratchet had never seen anything like it, from a fellow ground-bound mech.

  
Unfortunately, it did little good. Red Alert, having no way to reverse his trajectory, careened into the side of a dusty brown cliff, his legs crumpling underneath him like paper. If you asked Ratchet, that was far preferable from his head connecting with the rock, or his chest, or really any other delicate and very lethal part of his frame. The fact that his legs had collapsed under his momentum and weight was a good thing- most energon lines had been clamped off by pinching metal, sealing the bleeding from being too bad.

  
And now, here he was in stasis on one of Ratchet's operating tables. The rest of the battle had gone smoothly and Red Alert was recovered without a hitch, though Ratchet's processor was still thinking about the almost graceful way the paranoid glitch he called a friend had flipped in the air.

  
_Speaking of glitch..._

  
Ratchet finished the soldering job on the worst of the wiring, and decided to take a break from the numbingly boring job of leg repair to check on Red Alert's CPU. If the landing had jostled his logic-governing circuits, or the connections between his overload-redirecting horns and the shorts that kept naturally popping up in the circuitry in his head, he could have a much more dangerous problem than broken legs, when he onlined.

  
Though he'd gotten to examine Red Alert a few times before, the paranoid security director rarely went to anyone other than Hoist for routine maintenance. Ratchet, actually, could see why. Hoist was no processor-engineer, he could tell a shorted circuit from a broken chip, but he couldn't tell what Ratchet could from both years of experience, and actual formal schooling in the matter. It kept Red Alert from having anyone point out that frankly his CPU was an astonishing, and impressive, mess.

  
Ratchet hummed. As most mechs with processor-engineering background knew, the CPU started as a fairly blank slate. It was loaded with vital coding for operations of certain processes of the frame and basic information, but like a human brain, it was a blank slate for personality to fill, experiences to shape, language to learn and information to collect. The spark, once loaded in the spark chamber of the frame, would activate the Sentio Metallico reserves in the body, free-writing "code" that would dictate the nature of the cybertronian, connections between the spark and frame, connections to the frame and CPU. Living metal that moved on its own to create circuits, chips, wires, and complex connections that even skilled engineers took hundreds or thousands of cycles to begin to develop, all within the reset of an optic. It was a process that nobody truly understood, though it could be replicated and jumpstarted for frame transfers, and Sentio Metallico could be synthesized and produced in small batches. But for the most part it was a mystery- one of the greatest of cybertronian biology.

  
Ratchet shook his head. He was getting distracted. He turned up the brightness of his optics to illuminate the interior of Red Alert's CPU.

  
The Sentio Metallico in Red Alert's head was, frankly, everywhere. It seemed that instead of making a few vital connections and circuits, it had improvised superfluous hard-coding and circuitry everywhere. There was extra processing space for sensory input- so much Ratchet could hardly believe that it all fit in Red's helm- as well as shorted connections between so many parts of his CPU that Ratchet was amazed. He had seen this before, long before the war started and turned everything on its audial on Cybertron. It was a rare occurrence, one that happened when a spark that called for a specific kind of frame was placed into a frame that didn't fit it. It happened when a spark tried to rewrite the function of a CPU to be in line with what it felt it was meant for, as opposed to what the frame necessitated.

  
Wrong-framed. Red Alert was _wrong-framed._

  
Ratchet cycled his fans and backed up half a step, buzzing in thought. No wonder Red Alert was paranoid and hyper-vigilant. No wonder he spent so much time in his biped mode, as opposed to his alt mode. No wonder he was twitchy and generally strange. He had so many crossed wires and hypercompensationary hard-program blocks to make up for his spark and frame being mismatched, it was surprising he was as coherent and functional as he was. Ratchet had only seen one case of wrong-framing in person before, and it was not nearly this bad. Even the textbook examples he'd observed in his schooling days rarely were this severe. He did a second cursory check of the logical regulation circuits in the rear of Red Alert's CPU, reinforced the heat-sinks and static absorption routes in his sensor horns, and shut the mech's helm up securely.

  
_Now, to online Red Alert,_ Ratchet mused. Sure, the repairs on his legs were only half done, but that would simply serve to keep Red Alert in one place. They needed to have a talk.


	2. Onlined

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And part 2 of 2! Mentions of non-canon Cybertronian anatomy, headcanons inspired by IDW Generation 1's universe, and robot transphobia.

It was about 80 breems after Ratchet removed the medical stasis lock from Red Alert before the security mech started to online. That was a fairly standard time after being in deep stasis for a while, and Ratchet wasn't particularly concerned when Red Alert took his time rebooting his systems, filling the room with the low hum of optics and vocal components turning on and warming up.

Ratchet didn't look up when Red Alert groaned out static and raised a hand to his forehead.

"I am in the medbay."

"You are, congratulations."

Red Alert chuckled dryly. "Please tell me that I can't feel my legs because you're doing something to them, not because I'm missing them entirely."

"The former, though you came close to needing a completely new pair," Ratchet replied.

The medic let silence lull for a moment, listening to the faint whirr of Red Alert's optics scanning over the ceiling of the medbay. He was still preoccupied with the repairs on his legs, but that didn't mean he was going to, as humans would say, "beat around the bush."

"How long have you known?"

Red Alert lifted his head slightly to look down at Ratchet, where the medic was bent over his right leg. "Well, considering I just onlined, I'd say about four kliks. Since you told me. Do your memory banks need a defrag, old mech?"

Ratchet didn't even bother looking up. Judging from the good-natured laugh the Security Officer gave, Red Alert knew full well that he'd earned one of Ratchet's patented death stares. "You're as bad as your brothers."

"So sue me, I don't know what you mean."

Carefully schooling his faceplates into something that didn't resemble the fond smile that threatened to break through, Ratchet raised his head and caught Red's optics. The pinpricks of the mech's many irises were unfocused, looking in multiple directions. From knowing Red Alert for a couple thousand years, Ratchet knew that meant one thing- the mech was nervous.

"Specifically," Ratchet said, uncharacteristically gentle, "How long have you known you're wrong-framed?"

The result of those words was subtle, but instantaneous. Red Alert sat up as best he could, his legs useless from the medical bypass Ratchet had turned on to keep them stable. His plating fluffed and then snapped tight against his frame in a wave- a threat display carefully regulated into something more outwardly calm- and his optics focused on Ratchet's face. Red's own faceplates shifted through several emotions- fear, confusion, fear, anger, and fear again, his mandibles clicking against his mouth with each different expression.

"Did Inferno tell you? If he did, I'll-"

Ratchet cut Red Alert off before the mech could finish the empty threat against his best friend. "I figured it out myself, don't get your cabling in a knot. You're already in enough of a mess with these busted up legs of yours. Did you even think before you did that gymnastic flip of yours?"

".......No, it just happened, just happened." Red Alert's vocal synthesizer nervously skipped on the english words, and he switched over to speaking cybertronian. "How did you figure it out?"

Ratchet looked back down and resumed working on the patch of metal he was grafting to Red's leg. "I had to check your CPU to make sure your circuits weren't jarred from your little crash. They weren't, by the way- whatever you did to land feet-first saved the rest of your body from more damage."

"Thank Primus for small favors," Red Alert muttered sarcastically.

Ratchet looked up and poked a welder in Red's direction. "You go to Hoist so the rest of us won't tell you're wrong-framed," he stated.

"I did, yes. I don't want anyone to know, it's- there's a stigma, ever since the Functionists took rise in the Senate. That wrong-frames are glitches that should be scrapped, that we're going against Primus's will for our sparks. That frame dictates what the spark should be, what the worth of the mech is." Red Alert looked distinctly uncomfortable, drumming his fingers against the metal of the berth he was on. "By my estimate, half of all Autobots are Functionists of some kind, and I am- I-"

Red Alert trailed off, but Ratchet waited patiently for him to find his words. He turned his attention back to the task of repairing the inner frame of Red Alert's leg, but kept an audial sensitive for if Red began talking again. It was a few breems before he did.

"My Carrier and Sire wanted me to be an Enforcer, a Velocity model in specific. It was the same frame that they both had, and they were both very skilled officers. I was seven-thousand cycles old when they finally got me tested for why I was so glitchy, an over-sensitive and nervous wreck of a youngling. Why I was late in transforming my first time.

"I'll never forget what the processor-engineer told my creators when she looked in my CPU, did spectral analysis on my spark. Not to go into details- the long and short of it is that I'm a sky-spark. You can't tell anyone, not even Prime, please, Ratchet."

Ratchet looked up again, realization slowly dawning on him. "A sky-spark.... you think we'd hold that against you?"

The plating on Red Alert's back shifted position, like a bird ruffling its wings to get comfortable. "Decepticons are fliers, or at least flight-capable. Almost no Autobots are. And with how some mechs around here treat mechs like Skyfire, or the Aerialbots, or Powerglide..."

That was true. Of the mechs listed, only Silverbolt of the Aerialbots was given a modicum of respect around base; the rest were given wide berth, ignored, or in some cases, accused of being closet 'cons. And Silverbolt was only given that respect because he rarely flew unless given orders to do so. The scant few other mechs capable of flight- Wheeljack and the Twins came to processor- were only such because they had removable jetpacks. A completely different situation, in the optics of many Autobots.

"Anyways," Red Alert continued after a few moments of silence, "I don't particularly want to be more disliked than I already am. If word got out, that would definitely happen. Especially because, well... I feel more like a Seeker than anything else, and Seekers-"

"Are an exclusively Decepticon force," Ratchet finished Red Alert's thought, nodding in understanding.

"Yes. And even if that weren't the case, Ratchet, what good would it do to dwell on being wrong-framed? I have no chance of having my frame changed, supplies are needed elsewhere, for more important things than easing my dysphoria."

"How bad is it?"

Red Alert shifted slightly, crossing his arms over his torso. "Some days it is all I can do to not rip my own spark out, honestly. Everything feels too small, too cramped, the wrong size and shape. I can't recharge at night, can't power down without feeling the circuit-ghost of wings. It's awful. But I manage."

"That doesn't sound like managing, Red."

"I'm still here, aren't I?"

Ratchet frowned slightly. It was true, there wasn't anything he could do to alleviate Red's discomfort with his situation. And it sounded like the mech had accepted his lot, albeit begrudgingly.

"Do your brothers know?"

Red Alert exvented a hiss of air. "They hate Seekers. I can't tell them. They'd disown me."

Ratchet doubted that, but said nothing. There was no changing Red's mind when he was convinced of something.

"Please, though, don't tell anyone," Red Alert said again after a few breems. He looked more nervous than usual, and knowing his rationale, Ratchet didn't blame him.

"Ever heard of what humans call _doctor-patient confidentiality?_ "

"No?" Ratchet smiled and closed up a repaired panel on Red Alert's leg. "It means, don't worry. I won't tell anyone without your consent. Just keep yourself healthy, alright?"

Red Alert sagged in relief. "Deal."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's that! This is a premise that I'll continue working on here and there, and will be integrated into a larger story I have planned as well. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
